A Pioneer Narrative Critic and His Synoptic Hypothesis
Austin Farrer and Gospel Interpretation
Jeffrey Peterson
Institute for Christian Studies
Austin, Texas
“Why dig up solid foundations, why open questions long taken for settled?” So asked Austin Farrer 45 years ago as he undertook to challenge that seemingly most assured result of modern New Testament criticism, the Two-Source Hypothesis. [1] Farrer did not advocate a complete repeal of the nineteenth century, as William R. Farmer and others have done by their revival of the Griesbach hypothesis, the dominant theory of Synoptic relationships from ca. 1800 to 1860. [2] Farrer's work on the Gospels retained “the well-grounded conviction that St Mark's is the earliest written of the Gospels, and that the other three (two of them more particularly) knew and used his work.” [3] Farrer dispensed only with the second source of the Two-Source Hypothesis (hereinafter 2SH), the document hypothesized to account for the non-Marcan matter common to Matthew and Luke, usually designated Q or (inaccurately) the “Synoptic Sayings Source” or “Sayings Gospel.” [4] Rather than a lost source, Farrer accounted for the Double Tradition by appeal to Luke's use of Matthew in addition to Mark; the Q material he held to constitute “those parts of St Matthew's non-Marcan matter which were likely to attract St. Luke, in view of what we know about the general character of his Gospel, or can conjecture about his aims in writing it.” [5] The quality of “Luke-pleasingness” that Farrer ascribed to these particular Matthaean expansions of Mark's Gospel obviated the need to postulate an otherwise unknown source. [6]
Most scholars treating the Synoptics in the half-century since have been content to answer Farrer's challenge with a shrug and a repetition of his question: “Why dig up solid foundations? Why indeed?” “On Dispensing with Q” has been entirely neglected in Germany and gone largely unengaged in this country. [7] One factor in the United States has been the notoriety that Griesbachians have succeeded in winning for Matthaean priority, in consequence of which American scholars tend to assume that the only live alternative to the majority hypothesis involves abandoning the priority of Mark. [8] Thus, Helmut Koester, representative of both German and American scholarship at their highest levels, writes in an advanced textbook that “[a]ll attempts to disprove the two-source hypothesis favor the priority of Matthew or of some earlier form of Matthew,” [9] while introductory discussions and commentaries frequently commend 2SH as the most plausible solution to the Synoptic problem available, with only Griesbach (and so Matthaean priority) presented as an alternative. [10] Only in Farrer's own United Kingdom has his hypothesis received significant attention. [11]
Here is the answer Farrer gave to his own question: Why uproot the foundations laid for the study of the Synoptics by Holtzmann's Die synoptischen Evangelien and Streeter's Four Gospels? Because, Farrer maintained,
[s]ince Dr. Streeter wrote, our conception of the way in which the Gospels were composed has gradually altered; so gradually, that we have not observed the extent of the alteration. Nevertheless the change that has taken place removes the ground on which the Q hypothesis stood.
Even on the charitable supposition that Farrer was right about Q, he was evidently mistaken about the readiness of his contemporaries to recognize it as a superfluous entity. But since Dr. Farrer wrote (this essay contends) our accepted modes of studying the Gospels have shifted dramatically; so dramatically, that we have scarcely considered the implications of this shift for an hypothesis inherited from a generation of scholarship in which diachronic interpretation all but eclipsed synchronic. [12] When such an inventory is taken, it becomes apparent how unstable is the ground on which the Q hypothesis continues to stand, propped up as it is by the most learned and industrious scholars in the discipline. [13]
In what follows I will identify three recent developments in scholarship that materially affect our assessment of Farrer's hypothesis. All three reflect the end of the predominance of diachronic modes of exegesis and the advent of the synchronic, which has so altered the exegetical landscape since Farrer invited us to bid Q adieu. At the risk of mischaracterizing current study of the Gospels as intensely polarized between these modes (for the reality is more pandemonium than polarization), these shifts are stated as a series of alternatives: (1) whether we view the Evangelists as archivists preserving units of treasured tradition for posterity or as literary artists, shaping such traditions as they had received into narratives marked by, or at least aspiring to, coherence and integrity; (2) whether in reading the Synoptic narratives we give primary attention to the comparative order of pericopes or to the sequence of episodes within each Gospel, whether in other words our reading of the Gospels is primarily source-critical or narrative-critical; and (3) whether we understand the Gospels as addressed to isolated communities each possessing a distinctive, usually sectarian construal of Jesus and his significance or as addressing a network of churches extending across the Mediterranean, linked by personal and epistolary contact and exhibiting substantial agreement on Jesus' significance (if not lockstep uniformity), a federation whose members would have recognized one another as sharing fellowship in a universal church. If we reexamine aspects of Farrer's heretical proposal in light of such current perceptions of the Gospels, we may find that the shift of perspective he optimistically perceived in 1955 has belatedly arrived, and that it makes sense for us, as it did not so readily for Farrer's contemporaries, to entertain the surrender of Q.
The first shift that concerns us is one that Farrer himself identified, or better anticipated. At the heart of his case against Q stood the contention that the hypothesis wholly depends on the incredibility of St. Luke's having read St. Matthew's book. That incredibility depends in turn on the supposition that St. Luke was essentially an adapter and compiler. We do not now, or ought not now, so to regard him. And being once rid of such a supposition, we can conceive well enough how St. Luke could have both read St. Matthew's book as it stands, and written the gospel he has left us. Then at one stroke the question is erased to which the Q hypothesis supplied an answer. For the hypothesis answered the question, “From what does the common non-Marcan material of Matthew and Luke derive, since neither had read the other?” [14]
Luke was not essentially an adapter and compiler; he, like the other Evangelists, was an author. That judgment was central to Farrer's interpretation of the Gospels, and to his interest in Synoptic relationships. In the course of his work on the Gospels, Farrer cites only one scholar by way of general inspiration: R. H. Lightfoot, whose History and Interpretation in the Gospels and Locality and Doctrine in the Gospels Farrer credited with putting the reader “in touch with St Mark, a living Christian mind, and a mind of great power,” a “discovery . . . which comes like water in the desert to men who have been trained to see in his gospel a row of impersonal anecdotes strung together by a colourless compiler.” [15]
Throughout the period of Farrer's engagement with the interperation of the Gospels (i.e., between 1940 and 1968), the field was typified by the metaphor that was K. L. Schmidt's most famous contribution to the subject: the Gospels were regarded like pearls on a string, originally isolated units of tradition strung together on a secondary framework contributed by the Evangelists. [16] The Formengeschichte of Schmidt, Dibelius, and Bultmann proceeded on the assumption that the historically informative way to read the Gospels was to remove the pearls (i.e., the traditional units) from their string and examine them individually. Bultmann's students effected an apparent revolution without fundamentally altering this picture by developing the suggestions with which their teacher concluded his Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition concerning “The Editing [Redaktion] of the Traditional Material,” and especially his scarcely realized aim of clarifying “the theological character of Gospels.” [17] Redaction criticism as developed in Germany and imported to the United States redirected attention from the individual pearls themselves to the arrangement given them by the Evangelist, and to the narrative “string” connecting them.
For Farrer, however, as for a number of recent redaction and narrative critics, it is the necklace as a whole that adorns one's Beloved and therefore invites the attention of the interpreter. [18] Indeed, on his understanding Schmidt's metaphor is misleading; the necklace is not of pearls but of cut stones, each one carefully shaped by the Evangelist for its contribution to the finished product. [19] What is true for Mark is true for Matthew and Luke as well, with the qualification that each later Evangelist had before him a written source or sources, from which he quarried such material as met the needs of the story he wished to tell according to his own plan. [20]
When the story of Synoptic scholarship is told, the discovery of the Evangelists as authors is usually connected with the launch of redaction criticism on the Continent, credited to Günter Bornkamm, Hans Conzelmann, and Willi Marxsen. [21] This neglects the work of Lightfoot, whose Bampton Lectures of 1934, as Dennis Nineham remarks, “exemplified . . . the insights of what later came to be called redaction-criticism.” [22] Lightfoot and Farrer merit a mention alongside William Wrede as scholars who, though little followed in their time, engaged Mark as an author rather than a mere arranger of pre-formed tradition. [23]
To some degree, Farrer's work even anticipates structuralist and post-structuralist exegesis of the Gospels, for on occasion he considers the relationship between the patterns he discerned in the narrative and the Evangelist's intention. Farrer's earliest published study of Mark announces his discovery of “a pattern of which St Mark was in some measure conscious, and which in any case shaped his story as he wrote it.” [24] His final discussion of Mark includes remarks even more explicitly distinguishing text from author. [25] In any event, the recognition of the Gospels as works of rhetorical art and the attempt to discern the literary patterns ordering their materials are now the rule rather than the exception. [26]
The plausibility of Farrer's proposal concerning Q is greatly enhanced on the supposition that the Gospels are the product not of botchers but of weavers. In the next section we turn to one means of discerning the pattern that marks the weavers' work.
Consideration of the relative order of pericopae holds a venerable place in the discussion of Synoptic source criticism, in particular the argument that since either Matthew or Luke always agrees in order with Mark when the other fails to agree, Mark . B. C. Butler (an Augustinian) pointed out that the argument is invalid, the conclusion not following from the premises. Adherents of 2ST such as Christopher Tuckett have agreed with Butler that “the much discussed appeal to the failure of Matthew and Luke ever (or hardly ever) to agree against Mark in order and wording does not prove that Matthew and Luke independently used Mark as a source; it only shows that Mark is some kind of `middle term' between the other two in any pattern of relationships.” [27] E. P. Sanders has made the more significant observation that the premises are not true; a significant number of passages are not adequately described by the usual formula, including some ten in which overlap with Q cannot be invoked to account for the agreement against Mark. His conclusion is that the evidence supports Luke's use of Matthew. [28]
Such considerations of comparative order, by no means without value in the understanding of Synoptic relationships, are nonetheless remote from the concerns of many current interpreters. Indeed, it is ironic that most Gospels scholars remember Farrer if at all for his contribution to the Synoptic problem, for this was far from Farrer's principal interest in the Gospels. [29] Farrer's Synoptic hypothesis was ancillary to his principal interest, the literary interpretation of the Gospels, especially Mark. [30] Farrer's Marcan studies attend not to the relative order not on source criticism but on the narrative sequence of Mark (and to a lesser extent the other Evangelists), in which Farrer thought to find the interpretive key that would unlock the Gospels as theological statement and as historical witness. [31] In this focus on the internal sequence within the Gospels, Farrer anticipated the concerns of contemporary narrative critics.
Such a focus engages the argument for the existence of Q based on Luke's order in the Double Tradition. On the standard hypothesis, while Matthew combines the teaching material in Q to produce his five discourses, Luke follows Q's order; this accounts among other things for the absence of structure many interpeters have found in Luke's Journey to Jerusalem (Luke 9:51–19:27). To account for this section of the Gospel on the basis of Luke's narrative logic would significantly affect the assessment of the probability that Luke derived the order from Q.
The most convincing general characterization is by David L. Tiede, who describes the section as “a literary device for gathering a host of stories, sayings, and episodes into a sequence which has direction and purpose,” which he characterizes more precisely as “the schema of an extended journey as the occasion for interpreting `the way of the Lord,'” presented in three distinct stages (Luke 9:51–13:21; 13:22–17:10; 17:11–19:27). In view of the striking and programmatic opening pericope (Luke 9:51–56), Tiede entitles the section “The Way of the Determined Messiah.” [32] None of the several proposals to account for the arrangement of this section commands wide assent, but in recent study the question has been reconceived as one of narrative logic. Thus, Joel Green has identified five “interrelated narrative needs” met by the section. [33] Further, Green and Alan Culpepper have eschewed suggestions of architectonic structure and invited attention to the orderly connection of one pericope with another. [34]
Farrer's own attempt to clarify this sequence invoked typology, arguing that Matthew composed his Gospel on a Hexateuchal pattern (culminating in a “Book of Joshua [Iesous]), that Luke perceived this Matthaean pattern and reproduced it with considerable alteration, and that the Journey constitutes the Lucan Deuteronomy. [35] Even so sympathetic a critic of Farrer as Michael Goulder regards this suggestion as more ingenious than convincing. [36] Yet a less ambitious proposal that Deuteronomy serves as a model for the Journey appeared in the same volume. C. F. Evans proposed no typological schema extending throughout the Gospel; he merely identified a series of parallels in theme (and to some extent language) between Deuteronomy LXX and the Lucan Journey, suggesting that the former served as model for the latter. [37] Those scholars who have not ignored Evans's suggestive proposal have tended to accord it only summary dismissal, without detailed discussion of the sequential parallels. [38] Thus, Tiede's observation that “the outline of Deuteronomy simply does not dictate the sequence” of 9:51–19:27 and Luke Johnson's demurral that “Luke's imagery is more wide ranging” than Deuteronomy do not directly engage Evans's suggestion that the Journey takes Deuteronomy as a model, which it follows with some freedom. [39] A section so composed would not stand alone within Luke-Acts, in the judgment of recent interpreters; Joel Green has argued that the Lucan Infancy interacts extensively with the story of Abraham related in Genesis 11–21, and Luke Johnson has found the structure of Luke-Acts as a whole disclosed by the exegesis of Deut 18:15 incorporated in Stephen's speech in Acts 7, which reflects close study of the LXX of Genesis, Exodus, and Deuteronomy, among others. [40]
Such an understanding of the Journey, as integral to the composition of Luke's narrative rather than the deposit of teaching traditions he preferred not to omit, seems more appropriate to a Gospel known for its literary artistry. [41] At issue in this investigation is not only the order that should be followed in the reconstruction of Q but also its very existence. For to the extent that the Lucan sequence in the Double Tradition is found congenial to Luke's narrative (whether on the scheme commended here or on some other), an unattested source whose order Luke (for the most part) passively adopted but Matthew rearranged to produce his great discourses (among other things) is rendered a superfluous entity. As appreciation of Luke's literary design appreciates, the stock of Q must tend to fall.
The most recent development that casts a new light on Farrer's farewell to Q is the proposal that the Gospels were written not for isolated conventicles but for the Christian readership at large in the first century. [42] This historical thesis is not as obviously connected to the “synchronic shift” noted in our first two considerations, but in fact it coheres nicely with them. Exegesis pursued on the basis of source-, form-, and redaction-critical models is characteristically focused on the transmission of traditions concerning Jesus and on the application of those traditions in ecclesial situations faced by the Evangelists (or the tradents who preceded them). In redaction criticism especially the attempt has been made to construe each Gospel as a tightly focused response to a crisis (or at least a situation) in the specific community addressed. [43] But if the Gospels are understood as works composed for a general audience, then interpretive attention may shift from the delineation of the community's situation and to the narrative of the Gospel itself. Narrative criticism turns out to be the mode of engagement most appropriate to the situation in which the Gospels originated.
It may be observed that Q as typically understood is rendered problematic on the understanding of the Gospels as generally addressed, and this in two respects. First, Q is held to be the charter document of a community who treasured the memory of Jesus as teacher rather than as crucified and resurrected Messiah. [44] Such a community would stand in clear tension with that network of urban conventicles calling on the risen Jesus as Lord from Jerusalem to Rome, as this network can be discerned in the Pauline letters. [45] If the reconstruction of such communities on the basis of the canonical Gospels is an error of method, then basing the reconstruction of a discrete community on Q is likewise problematic, and the setting in which Q originated and functioned is rendered unclear. Second, the thesis of relatively isolated communities is conducive to the suggestion that Luke was written independently of Matthew; whereas if the Gospels were intended for and enjoyed a broad circulation, it becomes difficult to suppose that a new book about Jesus could remain unknown for any great period of time in view of the extensive communication networks between the earliest churches. [46] To suppose any gap in time between the two Gospels is then to increase the likelihood of a later Evangelist's direct knowledge of his predecessor's book.
Even if fully embraced, none of these considerations of itself establishes Farrer's contention that Gospel scholarship should dispense with Q, nor do all of them taken together. They do, however, suggest that this contention may fruitfully be given a second hearing. For in the light cast on the Gospels by narrative criticism and related approaches, Farrer seems in some respects an interpreter half a century ahead of his time; Q meanwhile seems less a necessary postulate and more a reflection of the tendency that Gilbert Highet lampooned in classical studies as “the habit of Quellenforschung, the search for sources, which began as a legitimate inquiry into the material used by a poet, historian, or philosopher, and was pushed to the absurd point at which it was assumed that everything in a [work] . . . was derived from earlier writers.” [47] The non-Marcan correspondences in wording between Matthew and Luke of course attest that an inquiry into sources is legitimate to explain the relationship between these two Gospels; what is arguably absurd—more recognizably so now than 50 years ago—is the assumption that the direct dependence of Luke on Matthew is untenable. Yet it is on this assumption that, as Farrer saw with clarity, the postulate of Q depends.
The nineteenth century saw Griesbach yield the throne to Holtzmann, who ruled the twentieth with Streeter as vice-regent. It is early to predict the fortunes of the kingdom in a new century, but it is not entirely implausible to imagine that thanks to the work of Farrer and such partisans as Goulder, Sanders, Drury, and Goodacre, the challenger rejected in 1955 may yet wear the purple and claim the vast Synoptic kingdom for his own. At the least, his bid to rule stands a chance of being met today by a people more receptive to the prospect of his accession.
[1] A. M. Farrer, “On Dispensing With Q,” in D. E. Nineham (ed.), Studies in the Gospels: Essays in Memory of R. H. Lightfoot (Oxford: Blackwell, 1955) 55.
[2] For the recent revival of the Griesbach hypothesis, see William R. Farmer The Synoptic Problem: A Critical Analysis (New York: Macmillan, 1964); Allan J. McNicol et al., Beyond the Q Impasse—Luke's Use of Matthew (Valley Forge, Penn.: Trinity, 1996); David B. Peabody et al., Mark's Use of Matthew and Luke (Valley Forge, Penn.: Trinity, forthcoming). For critique from adherents of 2SH, see Christopher M. Tuckett, The Revival of the Griesbach Hypothesis: An Analysis and Appraisal (SNTSMS 44; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) and Sherman E. Johnson, The Griesbach Hypothesis and Redaction Criticism (SBLMS 41; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991). Apropos Farmer's concern for the relation of critical scholarship to historic Christian faith (most evident in The Gospel of Jesus: The Pastoral Relevance of the Synoptic Problem [Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994], 3–11 et passim), Ferdinand Christian Baur and David Friedrich Strauss may serve as reminders that adherence to Griesbach is no guarantee against modernist heterodoxy.
[3] Farrer, A Study in St Mark (Westminster: Dacre, 1951) 1.
[4] E.g., Helmut Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels: Their History and Development (Philadelphia/London: Trinity/SCM, 1990) 128–171 (“Synoptic Sayings Source”) and John S. Kloppenborg (ed.), The Shape of Q: Signal Essays on the Sayings Gospel (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994). Such designations, while descriptive of certain hypothesized antecedents to Q (on which see especially John S. Kloppenborg, The Formation of Q: Trajectories in Ancient Wisdom Collections [SAC; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987] 89–262, 317–328) are inaccurate as a description of the final form of the document which along with sayings includes narratives of John the Baptist's ministry and of Jesus' baptism, temptation, and healing activity, and indeed exhibits a narrative sequence moving from the vicinity of the Jordan in Q 3:3, to the wilderness in Q 4:1, to Nazara in Q 4:16, to Capernaum in Q 7:1 (Mark Goodacre, “Narrative Sequence in a Sayings Gospel? Reflections on a Contrast Between Thomas and Q,” paper presented to the Q Section, SB Annual Meeting, Boston, Mass., 23 November 1999).
[5] Farrer, “Dispensing,” 56.
[6] Farrer's interest in dispensing with Q can be dated to 1940, when he outlined his approach to the Gospels in a letter to his father (a Baptist professor of theology) and in an unpublished essay, one thesis of which was that “St Luke used St Matthew, and Q is a fiction of the critics, derived from the error of supposing the evangelists to be scissors-and-paste hacks like the Pentateuchal editors” (quoted in Philip Curtis, A Hawk Among Sparrows: A Biography of Austin Farrer [London: SPCK, 1985] 120) Farrer was not the first to combine Marcan priority with Luke's use of Matthew as well as Mark; see Eduard von Simons, Hat der dritte Evangelist den kanonischen Matthäus benutzt? (Bonn: Georgi, 1880); E. W. Lummis, How Luke Was Written: Considerations Affecting the Two-Document Theory with Speical Reference to the Phenomena of Order in the Non-Marcan Matter Common to Matthew and Luke (Cambridge: University Press, 1915) esp. 38; James Hardy Ropes, The Synoptic Gospels (London: Oxford University Press, 1934) 37, 66–68, 93–94; and Morton Scott Enslin, Christian Beginnings (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1938) 431–434. Farrer differed from these in that his source hypothesis formed one element of a thoroughgoing revaluation of the Synoptic tradition. Further, it is not clear whether he wrote in dependence on any of these predecessors, whom he never cites. In Michael Goulder's apt phrase, however, “Farrer contemned the footnote” (“Farrer as Biblical Scholar,” in Curtis, Hawk Among Sparrows, 193), and his own attitude towards citation is captured in the preface to the published version of his 1946 Bampton Lectures: “My debts are to such obvious sources for the most part that there will be no real fraud in leaving them unacknowledged,” with acknowledgment of a specific point of indebtedness to Gabriel Marcel's Être et Avoir (The Glass of Vision [Wesminster: Dacre, 1948] x). This suggests that, if any, Farrer may have depended on Ropes's or Enslin's surveys (“obvious sources,” perhaps, for the study of the Gospels at that time).
[7] A notable American exception to the rule is E. P. Sanders, whose Studying the Synoptic Gospels (co-authored with Margaret Davies; London/Philadelphia: SCM/Trinity, 1989) not only engages FH (somewhat infelicitously termed “Mark without Q”) but embraces it as the most satisfactory account of Synoptic origins; though the case is rather diffusely presented (see pp. 21, 62–63, 93–97, 103–105, 117 [where the paragraph endorsing FH is lacking enumeration as 3]) and qualified (not to say confused) by the favor shown one element of M.-E. Boismard's complicated theory of Synoptic relationships, viz., “criss-cross copying” (see pp. 105–111, 117). Sanders is, however, less an exception than he may at first appear, having studied in Oxford and co-authored the book with Margaret Davies while a member of that faculty. See also Joseph B. Tyson, “Source Criticism of the Gospel of Luke,” in Perspectives on Luke-Acts (PRSt Special Studies 5; ed. Charles H. Talbert; Danville, Va./Edinburgh: Association of Baptist Professors of Religion/T. & T. Clark, 1978) 27–28, which is potentially misleading in describing FH as “a hypothesis that was, in some respects, similar to that put forward by Augustine of Hippo,” without mention of the former's Marcan priority (27 and n. 11).
[8] The situation will not be improved by the outright confusion of FH with the Augustinian Hypothesis (which, like Griesbach, entails Matthaean priority) in David Laird Dungan's Griesbachian History of the Synoptic Problem (ABRL; New York et al.: Doubleday, 1999) 376, 378, 384–385.
[9] Koester, Ancient Christian Gospels, 130. Another Handbuch discussion by an accomplished German scholar in evident innocence of FH is Dieter Lührmann's Itinerary for NT Study (London/Philadelphia: SCM/Trinity, 1989 [1984]) 42–45.
[10] Among recent commentators, see W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel according to Saint Matthew (vol. 1; ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1988) 97–127; Joel Marcus, Mark 1–8: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB 27; New York et al.: Doubleday, 1999) 40–47. For introductions, see Luke Timothy Johnson, The Writings of the New Testament: An Interpretation (rev. ed.; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999) 156; Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (ABRL; New York et al.: Doubleday, 1997) 111–116; Mark Allan Powell, Fortress Introduction to the Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998) 16–19. Noteworthy for its consideration of “the Farrer-Goulder hypothesis” is John S. Kloppenborg Verbin, “The Life and Sayings of Jesus,” in The New Testament Today (ed. Mark Allan Powell; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1999) 10–30, at 14–15.
[11] See especially Michael D. Goulder, Midrash and Lection in Matthew (London: SPCK, 1974); Luke: A New Paradigm (2 vols.; JSNTSup 20; Sheffield: JSOT, 1989); “Is Q a Juggernaut?” JBL 115 (1996) 667–681; and “Self-Contradiction in the IQP,” JBL 118 (1999), pp. 506–517; Mark S. Goodacre, Goulder and the Gospels: An Examination of a New Paradigm (JSNTSup 133; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996). See also John Drury, Luke (New York: Macmillan, 1973); Tradition and Design in Luke (Atlanta: John Knox, 1976); and The Parables in the Gospels: History and Allegory (New York: Crossroad, 1985); Eric Franklin, Luke: Interpreter of Paul, Critic of Matthew (JSNTSup 92; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994); Jonathan Knight, Luke's Gospel (New Testament Readings; London and New York: Routledge, 1998).
[12] For two excellent brief accounts of the interpretive shift here referred to, see Robert C. Tannehill, “Freedom and Responsibility in Scripture Interpretation, with Application to Luke,” in Literary Studies in Luke-Acts: Essays in Honor of Joseph B. Tyson (ed. Richard P. Thompson and Thomas E. Phillips; Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1998) 265–278, and William S. Kurz, S.J., Reading Luke-Acts: Dynamics of Biblical Narrative (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox, 1993) 1–6.
[13] Michael Goulder has noted that the Q hypothesis “has the highest vested interest of any New Testament hypothesis in that virtually every scholar has written a book assuming its truth” (“Farrer the Biblical Scholar,” in Curtis, A Hawk Among Sparrows, 197).
[14] Farrer, “Dispensing,” 56.
[15] Farrer, Study in St Mark, 7.
[16] See Stephen Neill and Tom Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament 1861–1986 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) 254.
[17] Bultmann, History of the Synoptic Tradition (rev. ed.; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963; reprinted, Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, n. d.) 338. See Sanders and Davies, Studying the Synoptic Gospels, 201.
[18] Farrer differs from recent reader-centered critics (e.g., Stephen D. Moore, Literary Criticism of the Gospels: The Theoretical Challenge [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989]) in that on his reading the Beloved whose neck the Gospels adorn is not the Psyche, the consciousness of the lone interpreter, a consciousness isolated even though shaped by various reading communities in which she participates (willingly or unwillingly). For Farrer, this role is played rather by the Ekklesia, the community of faith united in her confession of (more or less) the Nicene symbol; more or less, because Farrer's own Christology, after the manner of the pre-Constantinian church, appears more subordinationist than the homoousios is sometimes interpreted to allow.
[19] Farrer's response to Schmidt: “[T]he more we examine St Mark, the more his sentences are seen to flow away into the continuous process of his thought, and to bear the stamp of having been composed for the place in which they stand. Any line of the supposed summary is found to presuppose the anecdotes which on this hypothesis [i.e., the form-critical] have been fitted in above it” (Study in St Mark, 187). Farrer's evaluation of form criticism as dependent on literary interpretation (not vice versa) takes the form of a delightful account of “paragraph-criticism” as subordinate to “book-criticism” (Study in St Mark, 21–29). See also “The Mind of St Mark,” in Interpretation and Belief (ed. Charles C. Conti; London: SPCK, 1976) 14–22.
[20] See Study in St Mark, 26–27; St Matthew and St Mark (Westminster: Dacre, 1953) 38–56, 116–130, 160–199.
[21] See Neill and Wright, Interpretation of the New Testament, 283–284; Janice Capel Anderson and Stephen D. Moore (eds.), Mark and Method: New Approaches in Biblical Studies (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992) 8.
[22] Dennis Nineham, “R. H. Lightfoot and the Significance of Biblical Criticism,” Theol 88 (1985) 97–105. There is a certain irony in Nineham's having undertaken to vindicate his teacher's reputation and account for the neglect of his Gospel studies, while subsequently dismissing Farrer as “a philosophical theologian [who] . . . in the post-war period . . . interested himself in biblical questions” but was never a “widely recognized biblical scholar”; Nineham does account Farrer a “remarkable . . . and . . . saintly . . . man” (Crossing the Boundaries: Essays in Biblical Interpretation in Honour of Michael D. Goulder [ed. Stanley E. Porter, Paul Joyce, and David E. Orton; Leiden, New York, and Köln: Brill, 1994] xii–xiii).
[23] For Farrer's response to Wrede's construal of the Marcan “messianic secret,” see Study in St Mark, 221–246.
[24] Study in St Mark, v (italics added).
[25] E.g., “This [narrative pattern] is pleasing, whether or not St Mark did it on purpose,” and “The false suggestion of pattern is the suggestion that St. Mark ever held in mind the whole system of echoes which we diagrammatize in a single figure. Perhaps he never did. Even so, he may have been aware of writing one wave of antitypes after another. What he held before him would be no diagrams, either in his head or on paper; it would be the series of types in his already written narrative from which he was working” (“Levi the Son of Alphaeus,” unpublished MS, provided through the courtesy of Michael Goulder).
[26] Donald H. Juel suggests that for Mark at least Norman Perrin was a key figure in the transition from redaction criticism to narrative criticism (A Master of Surprise: Mark Interpreted [Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1994] 22–25).
[27] Christopher M. Tuckett, “Jesus and the Gospels,” NIB 8 (1995) 76. Tuckett's “ever (or hardly ever)” covers a multitude of sins; the traditional argument for 2ST did not equivocate on the question of agreements in order but held that Marcan order is always supported by either Matthew or Luke. It is of course grossly inaccurate to deny that “Matthew and Luke ever (or hardly ever) . . . agree against Mark . . . in wording” as such “Minor Agreements” number in the hundreds, and a significant few (most notably at Mark 14:65) cannot be accounted for by independent redaction.
[28] E. P. Sanders, “The Argument from Order and the Relationship Between Matthew and Luke,” NTS 15 (1968) 249–261, esp. 261.
[29] In this Farrer finds common ground with those scholars for whom the Synoptic problem is a trial to be endured periodically at the hands of enthusiasts rather than a topic of genuine interest, and discussion of same more a visit to the dentist than a day at the races.
[30] Farrer's pioneering contributions to literary interpretation of the Gospels, even more neglected than his Synoptic hypothesis, are recognized by Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1979) 60–64, 70, 72; Johnson, Writings of the New Testament, 181. Juel comments only that Farrer's “creative exploration of literary patterns places him outside the usual guild of Markan scholars” (A Master of Surprise, 118).
[31] The significance of various Marcan sequences of pericopae was the principal concern of Farrer's work on Mark, first treated in the fanciful dream disclosing the pattern of healing miracles as initially understood (Study in St Mark, 34–52; a corrected account of this sequence, confirmed by its adaptation in Matthew, is given in St Matthew and St Mark, 19–105, 116–130; yet another discussion of sequence appears in the book MS left incomplete at Farrer's death, which will be published along with other essays relevant to Marcan interpretation as Further Studies in St Mark, currently in preparation.. The whole enterprise is usefully evaluated by Goulder, “Farrer the Biblical Scholar,” in Curtis, Hawk Among Sparrows, 204–212.
[32] David L. Tiede, Luke (ACNT; Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1988) 194–195.
[33] Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke (NICNT; Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 1997) 394–399.
[34] R. Alan Culpepper, The Gospel of Luke: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections (NIB IX [1995]), 12, and 214–364 seriatim; Green, 399 n. 20. This is in part a response to proposals of chiastic structure (e.g., Charles H. Talbert, Reading Luke: A Literary and Theological Commentary on the Third Gospel [New York: Crossroad, 1984] 111–113), which Green dismisses as unpersuasive “because of the length of Luke's central section, and thus the improbability that Luke's audience (especially his auditors!) would be able to balance in their short-term memories so complex a structure over such a lengthy a span of narrative time” (399 n. 20). See also McNicol et al., Beyond the Q Impasse, 151–244 (esp. 152–153).
[35] This of course develops B. W. Bacon's proposal that the conclusions to Matthew's five discourses divide the Gospel into a Pentateuch . Farrer further suggested that Luke's method in the composition of the individual pericopae of the Journey resembled rabbinic midrash in characteristically juxtaposing two Matthaean texts as the basis for each new paragraph. See the discussion in “Dispensing,” 73–82.
[36] See Goulder, “Farrer as Biblical Scholar,” (in Curtis, Hawk Among Sparrows) 196–197.
[37] C. F. Evans, “The Central Section of St Luke's Gospel,” in Nineham (ed.), Studies in the Gospels, 37–53. Farrer in fact refers the reader of his essay to Evans's (“Dispensing,” 79), which is usefully summarized in Evans, Saint Luke (TPINTC; London/Philadelphia: SCM/Trinity, 1990) 34–36, and in Drury, Tradition and Design, 139–140.
[38] The essay and the relevant section of Evans's commentary are without citation in Tannehill, Narrative Unity; Talbert, Reading Luke; and Green, Gospel of Luke. A yet more summary dismissal than those cited in the next note is found in Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J., The Gospel According to Luke (I–IX): Introduction, Translation, and Notes (Garden City: Doubleday, 1981): Jesus “is not [here] depicted by Luke as a `new Moses,' pace C. F. Evans” (826).
[39] Tiede, Luke, 195 (who however lists considerations favoring Evans); Luke Timothy Johnson, The Gospel of Luke (SP 3; Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1991) 163. Evans himself granted that “[s]ome of the resemblances of subject matter and wording in these parallels may be fortuitous. Deuteronomy is a diffuse and very repetitive book, and Lk. 951—1814 is heterogeneous” (“Central Section,” 50).
[40] See Green, Gospel of Luke, 52–58; Johnson, Acts (SP 5; Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1992) 136–138, at 137.
[41] As acknowledged by Streeter himself: “a consummate literary artist,” Four Gospels, 548.
[42] See Richard J. Bauckham (ed.), The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences (Grand Rapids, Mich., and Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 1998).
[43] See as representative T. Weeden, Mark: Traditions in Conflict (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971); Anthony J. Saldarini, Matthew's Christian-Jewish Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); P. F. Esler, Community and Gospel in Luke-Acts: The Social and Political Motivations of Lucan Theology (SNTSMS 57; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
[44] See Kloppenborg, “Easter Faith and the Sayings Gospel Q,” Semeia 49 (1990) 71–99.
[45] For Jerusalem and Judea generally as party to the Christological concord obtaining between Paul's churches and Rome, see especially 1 Cor 15:1–11; Gal 1:23.
[46] See Michael B. Thompson, “The Holy Internet: Communication Between Churches in the First Christian Generation,” in Bauckham, Gospels for All Christians, 49–70.
[47] Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1949) 499. Highet's description of the dismal state of classical studies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (466–500) is instructive for comparison with the study of the NT.